Daily Quick Read - October 10, 2019

Saying Isn’t Doing

Unilever is a multi-national corporation that produces a broad range of products ranging from ice cream to condiments to soap and shampoo.  Almost all of them are packaged in plastic.  This week the company announced its plans to cut the use of new plastic in half by 2025.  The reduction would be on the order of 386,000 tons/year of various plastics.  The devil is in the details however. In this case it is the word “new” that suggests that the company isn’t abandoning plastic just pushing for more recycle and reuse.  They’re not getting rid of single use plastic packaging – the onus still falls on consumers to recycle and recyclers to produce sufficient quantities of the right quality material at the right price.

Unilever, whose products are used every day by 2.5 billion people in more than 190 countries, aims to reach this goal by using more recyclable and recycled packaging, as well as by selling more products without any packaging at all. Monday's pledge builds on an earlier commitment to make all of its plastic reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025 and to source 25 percent of its packaging from recycled plastic, also by that date.

Greenpeace's Global Plastics Project Leader Graham Forbes said that Unilever's plan was the most ambitious corporate plan he had seen, but he urged the company to be transparent about its progress and to concentrate on phasing out single-use plastics entirely.

"While this is a step in the right direction ... Unilever's continued emphasis on collection, alternative materials, and recycled content will not result in the systemic shift required to solve the growing plastic pollution problem," Forbes said, according to NPR. "We encourage Unilever to prioritize its efforts upstream by redesigning single-use plastic and packaging out of its business model."

Methane Fountains

Frozen methane gas bubbles in Canadian lake

Global warming is melting vast areas of permafrost in Russia and Canada.  As the permafrost melts, methane gas is released.  Methane (CH4) is a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than (CO2).   Still, a methane fountain must be something to see.

Scientists in Siberia have discovered an area of sea that is "boiling" with methane, with bubbles that can be scooped from the water with buckets. Researchers on an expedition to the East Siberian Sea said the "methane fountain" was unlike anything they had seen before, with concentrations of the gas in the region to be six to seven times higher than the global average.

Locked within in the permafrost is organic material. When the ground thaws, this material starts to break down and, as it does, it releases methane—a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. With global temperatures increasing, scientists are concerned the warming will result in more permafrost thawing, causing more methane to be released, leading to even more warming. This is known as a positive feedback loop.

Speaking of Methane

US Greenhouse Gas Production in CO2 Equivalents

The US can rightly claim to have reduced the production of CO2, but we have not reduced our production of greenhouse gases as CH4 generation has expanded.  While becoming a world leader in natural gas production and export, the US has greatly expanded its production of greenhouse gas.  

…carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. The second most important contributor to climate change is methane—CH4. And, when you frack the countryside for natural gas to burn in power plants, lots of methane leaks out at every stage of the process, from drilling to combustion. So: less carbon dioxide, more methane.

… we have wasted the past decade on a strategy that reduced our carbon-dioxide emissions but had no net effect on our total emissions of greenhouse gases. Indeed, by promoting the use of gas around the world, the United States has helped to insure that similar emissions charts for other countries will look much the same. For example, when the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, travelled to Houston last month, it wasn’t just to attend a rally with President Trump; it was also to sign a massive agreement to import American gas.

Fossil Fuel Forever

Fossil fuel companies routinely pay for advertising that touts their contributions to cleaner air and their research into clean energy.  However, the money they spend telling the public how green they are is dwarfed by the money spent ensuring that no laws are passed to restrict those companies from polluting the environment and pumping more climate change generating products from the ground.

A new study of Facebook’s advertising disclosure platform by InfluenceMap suggests oil companies and their trade groups have spent $17m directly on political social media advertisements since May 2018.

These ads include PR highlighting low carbon alternatives and at the same time involve direct lobbying against climate initiatives and the promotion of continued fossil fuel extraction in the energy mix.
The use of groups that term themselves grassroots community organisations but are funded by major companies is known as “astroturfing”.

In 2014, a leaked document from the Western States Petroleum Association – the oil and gas trade body in states including Washington, Oregon and California – detailed the use of such community groups to push back against climate campaigners and the anti-oil agenda – something WSPA described as “the worst of times”.
Research for The Guardian by InfluenceMap has uncovered various examples of so called astro turfing. Within the Facebook adverts, the funders tend to be disclosed as the named group behind the adverts with no information on who ultimately controls these groups. Only through further research does oil company support become more clear.

Plague of Parrots

Parrots are extremely social birds.  They prefer to live in large, gregarious, flocks that are engaging to view in their natural setting, but which can be quite irritating in public parks.  Monk parrots are native to South America and they are considered an invasive species in Spain, where their populations have grown over the last 15 years.  A cull of parrots is planned in Madrid.  This is the result of poor judgement by humans, who wanted pretty pets, but didn’t understand the potential consequences.

Many of the parrots escaped, or were released from captivity, and are now prolific in Madrid, as well as number of other areas in Spain. The population of Argentine parrots in Madrid's parks has risen by 33% in three years, from 9000 in 2016, to 12,000 already accounted for in 2019, according to data from the Spanish Society of Ornithology.

In 2005, there were an estimated 1,700 of the birds in Madrid.

As the population grows, so do the problems. The birds, considered an invasive species in Spain, are noisy, messy, and are certainly ruffling the feathers of local residents, who have already filed 197 complaints about the birds this year, and 209 in 2018.